The Paranoid Style in American Politics - by Richard Hofstadter (Harper's Magazine, 1964)

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Worth posting from time to time. Author of "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life": a key issue

Thanks for posting.

"Anti-Intellectualism in American Life": a key issue today in this increasingly technological and complex world. When human footprint on the neck of the planet is this heavy, stupid people in large numbers are dangerous as are stupid people in highest positions.

Not sure at all what to do.

Analysis

In considering the historic tension between access to education and excellence in education, Hofstadter argued that both anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were consequences, in part, of the democratization of knowledge. Moreover, he saw these themes as historically embedded in America's national fabric, resulting from its colonial European and evangelical Protestant heritage. He contended that evangelical American Protestantism's anti-intellectual tradition valued the spirit over intellectual rigor.[5]

Definition

Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.”[6]

Also, he described the term as a view that "intellectuals...are pretentious, conceited... and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive ... The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise."[7]

Conservative websites for the conned and the Qonned are "plain sense" on meth, dressed up with the fraudulent analysis of "conservative thinkers", replete with glaring logical and factual errors and cherry picked references to credentialed quacks and crackpots.